


All tomorrow's parties.

by orange_crushed



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bellamy as the Time Traveler's Wife (But Not Really), F/M, Hope vs. Despair, Minor Clarke Griffin/Lexa, Praimfraya Sucks, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-05-01 16:36:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19181692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: "I know you're not real," Clarke says, infuriatingly.(Or: in which Bellamy Blake meets and misses and loses and finds the love of his life, again.)





	1. Chapter 1

She's crouched down in the weeds about fifty meters south of the dropship when Bellamy spots her, her back to him and the both of them suddenly alone but for the distant sound of hammering: he's got everybody off building fence sections, cutting down skinny trees for posts and sharpening the tops into stakes, spears. It's long dull stupid work and the mosquitoes are biting. The hammering is happening less and less as people sneak off to the river in twos and threes. He'd have done it too, but he's on watch. They can't really afford to not be.

Clarke said she was taking a walk, a euphemism for not sticking around to have another circular debate about staying or going or trying to get a parlay started, if that were even possible. For once they're not really angry at each other. Just at absolutely everything else, at almost everything about their lives and the entire known world. All the shit they can't control but just have to keep reacting to, like jumping crickets. How high? they have to ask, over and over. He didn't expect to see her again until she's cooled down. That usually takes a minute. She burns hot, though she often manages to hide it better than he does. But here she is, not far from where she left him, the blonde hair above her collar bright like a shock of white clouds. She's wearing some kind of ugly pinned-up grounder jacket he hasn't seen before. Great. She probably got deeply involved in another one of their fucked up pre-existing territory disputes in the last fifteen minutes that he didn't have eyes on her. Honest to God, she drives him fucking crazy sometimes.

"Hey, Clarke!" he calls. They were arguing not even half an hour ago, the kind of argument where you actually tick off your points one by one on your fingers. He doesn't have to feign the irritation in his voice. "What the hell are you wearing?" 

Clarke stands up abruptly, shakily, like she's been kneeling there too long and her legs locked up. She turns around slow, her fingers fanned at her sides: vulnerable, open. Unarmed, her hands say. _Why_ , he thinks, why on earth would she, _to me_ , he thinks, and then Bellamy really looks at her, and stops, and stares. Everything narrows down to this, to her: he can't hear the hammering far past them anymore, or it's become his pulse, the thrum of vertigo, of the bottom of something vast dropping out. He looks at her shocked eyes meeting his, and his hands shift on his gun without meaning to, because this is—this is Clarke, it is. And it isn't. There is no sense to it. He doesn't know what he's seeing. "Your hair," he says. That's it. Nothing else comes out, even though a thousand questions at once are scrambling his train of thought. "It's-"

"Shorter," she says, soft. Like when she's soothing a fever. Her lips are chapped. Parched-looking. "Yeah." Clarke's eyes are wild, like a cornered deer. Like people in the airlock, before they float. He's seen it. She is looking at him like they did, like they do: like people looking backwards at air. "I cut it."

She puts her fingers up to the fringe of it absently. There's a streak of fading red in the blunt waves, curling along her cheek. It was long this morning. Colorless.

"When?" Bellamy grinds out. 

"Four years from now," she says. 

" _What_ ," he says. His mouth is making sounds but they're barely connected to thoughts: his brain is a jammed trigger. "How?"

"With a knife," she says, and for a second his ears almost pop.

"What the," he says, "you know what I mean, how—the fuck—"

"I know," she says. "Sorry. I just." Her eyes are suddenly damp. "I thought, even if this is a hallucination, it'd be nice to hear you laugh."

"A what?" Bellamy shouts. He can feel his own seams starting to burst. He's never felt stupider in his life.

"I know you're not real," Clarke says, infuriatingly.

"Clarke," he says. "What are you talking about?"

Her eyes still haven't left his face. For a second she makes an expression he's seen before, the one that means they're all in for it now, the one where she gets ready to call your bluff or die on whatever particular hill the fight is currently on. But then it breaks, falls apart: her mouth trembles and then she's crying, just a little, her face softening and her eyes leaking, blinking against the sting. She finally looks away from him, scrubbing at her eyes like a child.

"I miss you," she says, her voice bleeding with it, choked by tears, "I miss all of you. I miss you so much," Clarke says, helplessly, and somehow that hurts him, physically hurts. They've all cried down here. Watched each other watching friends die. Clarke fights it harder than anybody he knows, only cracks when her whole dam bursts, and then rarely for long. She pulls herself back together by sheer will, usually. This Clarke can't, or won't, or else just doesn't care anymore. And that's—terrifying, Bellamy thinks. That's the most frightening thing he can imagine in their whole bullshit haunted green world. 

"Hey," he says. "Look at me." Trying for gentle. He can't help himself: it really hurts to see this. Whoever, whatever, whenever the hell she is. "I'm right here."

"Oh my God," Clarke exhales. She huffs a grim little laugh. "I wish." She lifts her head a fraction, swipes under her eyes with her fingers. He realizes now what it is, what's different. It's not her hair. It's everything. Her eyes are older than his. Impossible, but true. "I really wish you were," Clarke says.

And then she's gone.

"Clarke!" he shouts, at the space where she just was. Pointless. There's nobody there anymore. Bellamy blinks and rubs his eyes and stares ahead: trees, rocks. Scrubby little forest floor plants. Nothing else. He comes forward through the brush, trying to find her steps. She was there a second ago, and then she—wasn't. He scuffs around in the spot where she was standing, but there aren't even bootprints, crushed leaves. There's nothing at all. He turns in a slow circle, raising his gun a little on instinct. Somebody's fucking with him, with them. "Clarke!" he yells: angrily, frightened. He can hear the hammering again, somewhere back in the clearing. "Clarke!" The hammering stops. " _Clarke!_ "

"Hey, jackass!" somebody calls, from the far edge of the clearing. It sounds like Jasper, maybe. Pushing his luck. "She's down at the river!"

"Get a room!" somebody adds. There's a brief burst of laughter.

"Shut the fuck up!" Bellamy hollers back, and they do.

When he stomps down to the river some of the kids avoiding fence duty scramble out of his way and back up the hill, pulling their damp clothes on as they go and trying to give him lame apologies. Normally he'd take a second to enjoy that kind of thing, bust their balls for skipping out on the job, but he doesn't bother. He just stalks the riverbank until he finds her, sitting up to her chin in the middle of a shallow current, eyes closed and her long hair fanned behind her, trails of rippling sunlight on the water. "Clarke!" he says, loudly, and she startles up to her feet. She's still wearing a bra and underwear but it doesn't do much about covering her, uh, everything; he grits his teeth and looks the other way but Clarke just stands there scowling at him, soaked through and mostly naked and obviously glad to be embarrassing him. He deserves it, but he doesn't have time for this. "Get dressed," he says. "I want to talk to you."

"No."

"Clarke—"

"You want to talk, talk," Clarke says. "It's a billion degrees out here. I'm not getting out of the water unless it's an emergency." Her eyes suddenly widen. "Is it an emergency?"

He is briefly tempted to say yes.

"No." He chews on it for a second. "Not really."

"Then, no," she says. She stares him down and then, finally, crosses her arms against her chest. It's the tiniest give of ground, but from Clarke, a quarter-inch is something to be grateful for. "What do you want?"

"Where's your jacket?" he says. Her scowl takes on confusion.

"Why do—"

"I just do."

Clarke gestures at a pile of clothes on a flat rock a few feet away. Bellamy looks them over: pants, shirt, shoes, the windbreaker she's had since spring. "The big leather jacket," he says. "The grounder one, with all the pins."

"A leather jacket with pins?" Clarke stares at him, incredulous. "Are you maybe thinking of your sister?"

"I know what I saw," Bellamy says. The feeling of somehow being an idiot hasn't dissipated, but he can't stop now. He's got to know. "You had a grounder jacket on like, five minutes ago. Where'd you put it?"

Clarke's eyes narrow.

"Did you eat something in the woods?" She steps out of the water towards him, picking her way between the rocks. He steps backwards and she stretches her hands out. "Hey, hey, it's okay. What are you seeing right now? Are you hallucinating? Do I look like a grounder to you?"

He glances down at her, only for a second: wet and smooth and radiant and very very not something he needs to be paying any attention to. He swallows and shakes his head.

"Uh, no, no, you're—you're you," he says. "I didn't eat anything strange."

"You're sure?" she says, seriously, her anger clearly shoved off and forgotten for the moment. Doctor Clarke is in. "Be honest. If you did, we'll figure it out."

"I said I'm fine!"

"Well, good!" Clarke fumes, recovering. "Glad to hear it!"

"Great!" Bellamy snaps back.

They look at each other. It lasts a couple of seconds too long. 

"What did you need to ask me?" 

"Nothing," he says. "Enjoy your swim, your highness."

"I will!"

"I hope you do!" he says, and then retreats, before whatever scraps of his dignity might still be attached tear loose completely.

It was some kind of crazy mistake, he tells himself. Heatstroke. He decides not to think about it anymore. 

It almost works.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Two weeks later he's finishing a piss against a tree, rifle slung across his back, when a twig snaps somewhere to his left; he fumbles his dick back into his pants and zips barely halfway before he's twisting the gun around to aim. But then he lowers it again and goes back to hastily fixing his zipper. It's her again. Not her—Clarke—but _her_. Also Clarke. His mind is still trying to make that work.

"What is this?" he hisses. He can feel his cheeks burning a little, is his face actually red? Fuck. 

"This?" Clarke says. Her throat sounds rough. Her eyes are glazed over, distracted, like from pain. Unlike last time, she's not really looking at him much. But it's the same version of her. Short hair, check. Hideous jacket? Check. There's a bruise fading around her eye, across her left forehead. "I don't know. My subconscious torturing me?" 

"What happened to you?" Bellamy points at her face. And Clarke laughs. It's worse than the bruises.

"Life," she says. 

"Cut the bullshit," Bellamy snaps. "Where did you come from? What's happening to us?"

"To us?" Clarke says. She looks at him, now. Her eyes sharpen. "You're... you're only in my head."

Bellamy can't take it anymore; he strides forward until he's in her space, so fast and so close she doesn't back away in time, and then they're almost touching, so near he can almost feel the quick intake of breath she makes. Her cranes his face down. His frustrated exhale brushes aside a strand of hair from her cheek.

"Is this in your head?" he says. He meant it to be gruff but it doesn't arrive that way. It's softer, echoing her stance, her parted mouth. She's not pushing him away like she might. If anything she's turning upwards to him, flowerlike. He wonders at that. "You think this isn't real?" Clarke blinks up at him. Without thinking, he reaches up and touches the corner of her temple, where the purple is still shading above her brow. Clarke's breath hitches. "This looks real to me."

"Don't—"

"Are you telling me not to poke your giant bruise?" Bellamy asks. "Now I know it's really you." 

"Bellamy," she says, dazedly. And then she's—holding him. Her arms go around his middle and her face goes into his chest and both of his arms go out, away, in surprise, and so then he's standing there like a fool with his hands in the air, so he just—holds her, too. Puts his arms around her. And she goes stiff for a split second, like a board, and he's afraid he's done exactly the wrong thing, and then she burrows closer, digging her fingers into the back of his shirt, pressing their lungs together, their hearts. She's practically climbing him. Her arms are so tight. He's never been this close to Clarke. He's barely been like this with anyone.

They stand that way for what feels like a while.

Then Clarke leans back and lets go, not quite all the way. She keeps hold of his left arm with her right. She's not crying this time. His sleeves are rolled up and his arm is bare and her hand is so, so warm. "You're really here," she says. "Or I'm really there."

"Yeah," Bellamy says. He has to clear his throat to do it. "Seems that way."

"It's been—it's been years," Clarke says. "I'm a long way from the dropship, where I am now. The place that's now for me."

"I gathered," he says. He tugs a pin on her coat.

"Okay," she says, obviously to herself. She nods, also at herself. He waits. "We need to know how this works, and why," she adds, determined, and it's so fucking Clarke that he literally can't help but laugh.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
But they don't figure it out, not right then. He mostly just has time to wet a bandanna with some water from his canteen and wave it around until it's slightly cooler and then press it against Clarke's eye for a minute, after she admits that it's still aching. Also after she's taken three long desperate pulls off the canteen herself, like somebody teetering on the awful line between thirsty and dying of thirst.

"How'd you get hurt?"

"Running from a storm," she says. "I was almost in the rover but a piece of debris clocked me in the back." She sighs. "Which made me head-butt the door."

"Sounds like our luck," Bellamy says. "A hurricane?"

"I wish. Dust storm."

"You wish?"

Clarke shrugs.

"I need water."

"Oh. Here," he says, and unclips the canteen again, makes to hand it over. Clarke takes it, shakes it.

"Thanks," she says, but it's strangely thin. 

"Oh," he says, again. The picture suddenly clears. "You need a place to _find_ water."

"Yeah."

"Fuck," he says. He tugs at his hair for a second. "Things are that bad?"

Clarke doesn't answer. She's turning the canteen around in her hands, thoughtfully.

"I don't know what I should tell you," she says. 

"You're from the future," he says. "You should probably tell me everything."

"What if it changes things?"

"Like," Bellamy frowns. "Keeps you from dying of dehydration?"

"Like gets everybody killed," Clarke says, hard and sharp. 

And disappears.

"Oh, come on!" Bellamy shouts. A couple of birds scatter. He looks in the brush again but, like the last time, there's no sign she was ever there at all.

His canteen is gone, though. That's something.

In the swelter of his tent that night he lies itchy and perspiring above the sleeping bag and thinks about it over and over, picturing the way she stood, the trembling set of her mouth, that heavy jacket hung across her shoulders. The dirty golden line of her hair sitting straight and square along her jaw. It was definitely real. But nothing about it makes any kind of sense. So he runs it again, again, the way he'd go over security ops briefings when he couldn't sleep, when they all still lived in that privileged space shithole with his sister under the floorboards. It feels strangely like torture, especially replaying that first moment in the woods. Clarke's sadness that day moved him—not just sadness. _Grief_ , he thinks. He knows it pretty well. That's what it was. It was like seeing Clarke crying at his funeral. Crying like her heart was breaking, and that's really... something.

He doesn't think he's broken her heart. He'd remember something like that.

Alone, with nothing to prove and a layer of sweat on his skin making him feel like a wet garbage bag, he can admit the truth: he likes Clarke. More than a little. She's good-looking but that's rarely the first thing on his list, unless she's actually standing there in her underwear. Clarke is just somehow, improbably, the toughest fucking thing on the face of the planet. She's like a plant with a bent stem that just springs back up over and over. That backswing catches him in the face half the time, but honestly, oh well. She's a person he can trust to keep thinking and fighting, to stand between all of them and oblivion. It doesn't matter that the feeling's not especially mutual: he doesn't really need Clarke to like him back. They just need to work together. When he's not tearing his hair out over her, he's thanking whatever gods are left on earth that he's not doing this alone. 

Four years from now, she'd said. The future. He thinks about that most of all. If it was real, then that means something. It means they live. Clarke lives. And who knows how many more. Maybe everybody else. Maybe... maybe just not him. It might be why he saw that, saw her. Why he seems to be the only one. Why she looked so sad to see him that first time. So lost. It might be a kind of gift. He barely knows how they're going to make it to next week, but this? Four years. A promise of time. At least for them. 

She cries for him, someday. That's a piece of information she already told him, without meaning to.

He sleeps just enough to feel groggy in the morning; once he's up he goes looking for Raven, who rumor has it is hoarding the only packets of powdered caf. He doesn't find Raven. He finds Clarke. His Clarke. She'd probably brain him with a rock for that phrasing, but as evidenced by the riverbank incident, she clearly can't hear his thoughts. Thank fuck. Today she's incensed about people cutting the line to use the new comm tent.

"We have to take turns," Clarke says, "or it's not fair." She's bent over a plastic tub, checking things off on a clipboard as she counts them. Some kind of medical inventory. Good, that's a really great idea. He didn't know anyone was doing that. Running this camp is a fucking nightmare. "Some of these kids still need to tell their parents they're alive—"

"I'll talk to them," Bellamy says. "Won't happen again."

Clarke looks up.

"Oh," she says. "That'd—thanks." She makes a fractional little frown. "I thought," she says, and trails off. Bellamy raises his eyebrows. "Sometimes you just tell me to lighten up."

"Well," he says. He does, he does say that. He shrugs. "Sometimes you should," he says. "But we made a rotation for a reason."

"Yeah," Clarke says. She smiles. She really is pretty. "Thank you." 

"Just doing my part," says Bellamy. Her eyes narrow. "What?"

"Are you making fun of me?"

"No," he says, startled. 

" _Just doing my part,_ " she echoes, flatly. She's right. It does sound like he's making fun of her.

"Take it easy," he says. "I'm not. Anyway, I have to go... do rounds." That is, very definitely, a lie. It's Miller's turn.

"Okay." She goes back to digging in the bin. She doesn't look up when he leaves.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The next time it happens he’s almost ready. He’s been carrying an extra canteen for days now, which in this heat isn’t especially suspicious. He’s also been carrying around a couple of vac-sealed protein bars, a roll of gauze, one of their precious few canisters of antibacterial spray. Since they have an actual supply inventory as of last week, Clarke griped at him about that one. He told her it’s in case of hunting accidents, which made her ease up; she’d looked at him with something like anxiety in her face, and told him to be careful, that they couldn’t afford anything happening to him. It had been pretty nice. Then she’d made him sign the canister out on a fucking permissions form.

He finds opportunities to be alone: long range patrols, night watch, hunting, water runs. He probably should have told Clarke everything by now, but every time he pictures saying it he feels insane. _Hey Clarke, I met your future self_. Don’t know how yet. She’s thirsty and sad and likes me more than you do. Got any pressing questions for her? By the way, there’s still a non-zero chance that I might just have blown a gasket and none of what I just said is real. Yeah. She’ll have him locked up in the top of the dropship on sedatives faster than you can snap your fingers or say “risk to himself and others.” So that’s a non-starter.

The heatwave is just starting to break; he’s down at the river early in the morning, at the end of a night shift, washing the grime from his face and relishing the cold water and cool air, the pleasant shiver it sends down his spine. It’s laundry day but it’ll be hours before most of the kids drag themselves out of their tents and start half-heartedly carrying their stuff down here. So he has the place all to himself. Until the groaning starts. It’s pained but choked-off, like whoever is making the sound is trying hard not to draw too much attention. Bellamy checks his sidearm and stands up cautiously, still dripping. He scans the bank and the treeline, and sees a hunched-over figure halfway up the hill, leaning heavily against a broken tree. Golden hair, grounder jacket.

“Clarke!” he calls, and sprints up the bank, slipping a little in the fresh mud and wet stones; he gets to her just as she’s sinking down, her hands still clinging to the tree but her legs giving out, her whole body sliding downwards into his arms. He catches her and lowers her down, taking as much of the weight as possible. She doesn’t fight him at all: her head rolls back onto his shoulder automatically, her whole body shudders with an exhale that’s half a wheeze. “Come on, I got you,” he says. He eases her into a sitting position and she steadiers herself against his arms. One of her legs sticks out stiffly away from her, unbent. Her pant leg’s been torn to shreds, soaked in blood. He guesses the flesh under it’s not doing so great. “Holy shit, your leg—”

“Bear trap,” she says. 

“What?” he hisses. “What kind of fucked up place are you _living_ in?” he says, pulling at her shredded cuffs as carefully as he can, while she grips his arm hard and bites her lip, obviously to keep from screaming. “This is bad.”

“I can handle it,” she says. Her face is white, bloodless and rigid with pain. “It’s okay. I just need a second.”

“Like hell,” Bellamy says. “I’m gonna cut this off. Okay?” Clarke’s brows pinch together, then she gives a stiff little nod. He cuts away the bottom of the ruined pant leg with his knife, mostly without touching her leg; there are little shreds of fabric in the… incredibly hideous gouges underneath. He picks those out too, with his fingertips, and starts rinsing out her cuts with the canteen. There’s just so much blood.

“Get me to the river,” Clarke says, a little command creeping back into her voice, and he does it without question, hefting her up beneath her arms and walking her down to the water, where she sticks her mangled leg into the current and stifles a shriek, then settles down to let it irrigate for a minute. He hovers around her, unpacking the gauze and spray from his pockets and waiting impatiently. She takes her time cleaning the punctures, takes breaks to shut her eyes and breathe slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth, get herself back under control. When she’s done she sits on a rock and lets him dry her off, spray everything down, and wrap it up with her help and instructions. They don’t really talk much, otherwise: just a couple of words, there, and like this, and thanks. 

“What are you going to do?” he says when they’re done. He’s still crouched on his knees before her; his own pants are marked now too, with water and blood. He'll have to do some laundry himself before he goes back. Clarke doesn’t meet his eyes. She’s picking at the new ragged hem of her jeans. “Tell me you aren’t all alone still.” She looks up. A little bit of color is coming back into her face. 

“Not anymore,” she says, with a kind of strange excitement. Bellamy reads her face for a second and then does a double-take. 

“Are you—are you talking about the person who set the fucking _bear_ trap?” he says, feeling a tiny bubble of hysteria burst in his chest. There is a pointed silence. “For fuck’s sake, Clarke! Do you at least have a gun?” He pulls his sidearm off his belt. “Here. Take it,” he adds, trying to put it into her hands when she shakes her head. “Take it! You see them again, you shoot them in the face!”

“She’s a little girl,” Clarke says. She puts her hands around his, pushes the gun away, away from both of their bodies. She makes him holster it. “She was scared of me,” she says. “I won’t hurt her.”

“A little girl killed your best friend,” Bellamy says, and her eyes go huge and round for a second. “Did you forget that?”

“No,” Clarke says, quiet. “No. I never forget.”

“Where is everybody else?” he says. He takes a deep breath, screws his courage up: now or never. “Where am I?” he asks. “Clarke.” Her face is hardening but her eyes are still pleading with him, begging him to understand something he can’t translate. “Where am I?”

Clarke lifts her hand, brushes his cheek. He almost startles away from it, but the touch is so light it’s barely a touch at all. Like she can’t trust herself to connect. Her thumb hovers over his cheekbone. She smiles at him.

“You’re safe,” she says. “That’s what matters.”

“Please,” he says. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s asking her for. “Please, Clarke, I—”

And then he’s kneeling in front of a damp rock with nobody on it, holding the last of the gauze, wondering what on earth it was that he wanted so much to say.  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

When she comes back the next time she looks different: better, somehow. Stronger, more sure. She's remembered how to actually laugh. But mostly she’s business-like, direct with him.

“You should trust Lincoln,” she says. So she’s decided what tidbits of information to give him after all. And she starts with that one. Great. He scoffs and scowls and she smacks him in the chest, hard. 

“Hey!”

“I mean it. You have to trust Lincoln. He’s probably the best friend we’ve ever had down here. It may not feel that way right now, but he—he’s family. Believe me. You can never, ever forget that. Okay?”

“Seriously, this is your important future advice?” Clarke hits him again. “What the fuck?”

“I’m not playing around,” she snaps. “If we don’t trust Lincoln, people die,” she says. “Good people. Innocent people.” That sobers him up. 

“Okay,” Bellamy says. “Alright.”

“Promise me.”

“Come on, Clarke,” he says. She stares him down. “Fine. I promise. I’ll—trust Lincoln.” He frowns. “As long as that guy stays away from Octavia.”

“Oh, you’re way too late,” Clarke says. “Don’t worry,” she adds, at the face he makes. “He’s good for her.”

“Have you got anything useful to tell me, or is this all about my sister and who she may or may not be—”

“Is Murphy back yet?” she says, which stops him cold. “Oh. Okay. Well, that’ll happen. Soon.”

“If he puts one foot into this camp—”

“We need him,” Clarke says. “It won’t make sense right now. But we do need him. Just—don’t let him hurt Raven. He won’t mean to. But he will. She doesn’t deserve that.” Clarke’s jaw sets. “She doesn’t deserve a lot of things that happened.”

“You going to tell me about them?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke says. “So many things… I just don’t know how. It’s like—there’s this line. There’s always this line, and it’s so thin. On one side, we live. On the other, we die. And if I tell you what happens, does that line break?” She rubs at her forehead. “And maybe I should tell you. Maybe that could change things just enough, so that this time, everything goes right. But what if I make it even worse? And we lose everything?” He doesn’t have an answer for that. “Sorry,” Clarke says. “I’m just not sure.”

“It’s not just up to you, though,” Bellamy says. “Even if you tell me. It wouldn’t be you changing things. It’d be me. Us. Making different choices.” He sees her resolve starting to bend a little, and pushes. “Why else would you keep coming back here?” he says. “If it wasn’t to help us do better? Huh? It’s not all about you. This is happening to me, too. To all of the others. It’s your past, but it’s not ours. Not yet. We’re in this together.”

“Together,” Clarke says, softly. Distantly. He gets the feeling she’s not really saying it to him. After a second, she meets his eyes. “He’ll be sick when he gets back,” she says. “Murphy. The grounders use the fever to—soften the battlefield. Keep him away from other people, as much as you can. And try to get everyone to wash their hands more. God, we were all so filthy. Everybody drinking out of the same cups—”

“I got it,” Bellamy says. 

Later, in camp, he mentions to Clarke—his Clarke, sort of—that her medical inventory has got him thinking, maybe they could step up hygiene a little? He volunteers to get some more tube-and-bucket handwashing stations built, especially around the latrines and their makeshift kitchen, and to give everybody public grief about cleanliness for a while. He doesn’t mention that maybe it’ll help them survive whatever creepy pathogen John Murphy is currently walking back to camp, but—maybe he doesn’t have to? Maybe this is something he should have been worrying about, planning for, all along. Clarke thinks that way: ten steps ahead. He can try to learn from that. Make them into a better team. “Little germ shock and awe campaign,” he says. “That be okay with you?”

“Okay with me?” Clarke says, raising her brows. “You’re describing one of my wilder fantasies.”

“Kinky, princess,” he says, trying to grin about it, but hearing the word _fantasies_ from her mouth did something to his equilibrium; his face feels like it’s pinking up again, the dirty traitor. “I’ll get it done,” he says, more gruffly, and makes to step out of the tent. Her hand on his sleeve stops him. 

“Bellamy,” she says. “You’re good at this. Taking care of people.” He’s still looking at her hand, the place where they meet. “I just—if you didn’t know. If you wondered. You are.”

She lets him go. 

“Uh,” he says. “Thanks.” He lifts the flap, and looks back. “You too,” he says. “I couldn’t—I wouldn’t want to do this alone.”

“No way,” says Clarke. “Anyway, you’re stuck with me,” she says, a little awkwardly, smiling, and Bellamy is struck by two thoughts at once, struck by the force of them, like an electric current. The first one is: you have no idea. And the second one is: I wish. I wish.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They see each other a few times in the forest, in passing glances, over the next few weeks. Future Clarke rarely stays for longer than thirty seconds or so, just enough time for them to find each other, to look at each other, to say a surprised hello, or get down, keep moving. The next real time she appears, he is curled up inside a wire cage in a lab somewhere in the guts of Mount Weather, bruises still mottling his back from the stun guns, every inch of his skin raw from the chemical showers, kicking the lock over and over again while they go for the grounder girl in the cage next to his. He’s screaming for them to take him instead and it’s a sick kind of relief when they do: their arms reach in and grab for his legs, and he’s driving his heels into them over and over, but one of them sticks a shock baton into his thigh and he sees stars for a second. He’s manhandled out of the cage and then dropped onto the floor to twitch and groan. There’s some scuffling above him that he barely registers, a shout and then a body falling across his legs, stumbling and then going limp, a dead weight over his hip. Bellamy pushes himself up and crouches, wobbly, on the cold floor. He looks up in time to see Clarke in her grounder jacket pulling a long dagger out of a technician’s throat. The guy sinks to the ground, clutching at his neck, and then lies face-down on the floor in a growing puddle of red. Bellamy looks back at the other body that fell over him. It’s got three stab wounds in the back.

In the cages, the grounders are all silent. Those that are still alive, still conscious, are staring intently at Clarke, watching her wipe her knife on her pant leg and stick it back into the sheath on her belt. Watching her come over to Bellamy, hook her hands under his armpits and help him upright, while the last of the shock clears from his nerves. 

“You okay?” she says. 

“I’m good,” he says. He looks down at her feet. “How’s your leg?”

“That was nIne—ten months ago, or so,” she says, “for me,” and while he’s still reeling from that she leans him up against a counter and goes over to rifle through the rack of jumpsuits and lab coats on the opposite wall. “Here, put this on.” He gets dressed while she strips the gun and badge off the dead guard and then hands them over to him. “Okay. I think Maya should be just coming into the lab. Tell her who you are and she’ll help you.”

“Maya?” he says. “Oh yeah. Jasper’s—”

“She’ll take you through the mountain,” Clarke says, cutting him off. She straightens his badge. “Whatever you do, get to the radio. I have to know you’re alive.”

“I know what I have to do,” Bellamy says. Her hand is still on his lapel; he covers it with his own. “Thank you.”

“You’d have handled it,” Clarke says. “I was just—”

“ _Chon yu bilaik_?” one of the grounders interrupts. It’s the girl in the cage next to his, the dark-haired one who told him the lab techs liked to prey on the strong. Echo, her name is Echo, she said. The one who spit on him. She’s staring at Clarke like she’s seen a ghost. So, okay, that answers one of his questions. It’s never been just in his head. “And _what_ are you?” 

Clarke looks back at her, and then at Bellamy. There’s something sad and soft in her face, even though there’s still a line of that tech’s arterial blood sprayed across her chin. 

“ _Ai laik—wanheda_ ,” Clarke says, and as Echo’s face registers something between terror and fascination, she adds, “nice to see you again, Echo,” obviously just to be dramatic about it, and then vanishes out of thin air. Her disappearing act doesn’t really surprise him anymore, but the whole thing makes Echo gasp and plaster herself against the far side of her cage.

“ _Chit_ the _fuck_ ,” says Echo.

He knows the feeling.

When he gets to the radio and hears Clarke’s voice he has to close his eyes for a second, the relief is so overwhelming; somehow he can feel her doing the same thing, wherever she is right now. She says his name in a rush of breath, promises she’ll buy him all the time he needs.

“Stay alive,” she says. He’ll try.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They compare notes next time: it’s linear for him, but not always for her, at least from this end. 

“Okay,” he says, scrubbing at his face. “Sure. That’s an extra layer of confusion that we definitely needed.” Clarke laughs under her breath. It’s more like a sigh. They’re sitting in the woods just beyond Arkadia’s fields. He was supposed to be back to lead a training session twenty minutes ago but she showed up in front of the rover on the road and that was that. 

For a second when he hit the brakes he thought it’s her, she’s back, and his whole heart had leapt up into his throat. He hasn’t seen Clarke, his Clarke, in months. Doesn’t know where she is, if she’s okay. She walked away after the mountain and he understood, really. He tried to. But it hasn’t kept him from feeling like a piece of himself has been ripped off, tossed into the wind.

This Clarke has a daughter now. 

“It feels weird to leave her,” she says. “But I haven’t found a way to control it. And she knows to stay put when it happens. And that I always come back.” She smiles into herself, smiles at her internal picture of a girl he can’t see. Hasn’t ever met. “She teases me a lot,” Clarke admits. “She doesn’t know why I—” she cuts herself off.

“Why you what?”

“It’s too embarrassing.”

“I think we’re way past that,” Bellamy says. Is there anything that Clarke could say, to really change the way he sees her? After what they’ve witnessed, what they’ve done? Anything is possible. But he doesn’t think so. Clarke watches his face. He wonders, sort of madly, if she can read his mind now, if somewhere along the line that changes, and he becomes totally transparent to her. He thinks of the riverbank, her wet skin in the sun. It feels like a hundred years ago. Like yesterday.

“Yeah,” Clarke says. “I guess so.” She stretches out her hands in front of her, hooks them around her knees. “I call you every day on the radio,” she says. He gives her a blank look.

“Like... from the future? Is that—”

“No,” she says. “ _You_.”

Oh.

“Do I ever answer?”

“Not yet,” says Clarke. “There’s some—interference. Signal stuff. Raven would be able to figure it out, but I haven’t yet.”

“How long?”

“Three years,” she says. His mind boggles.

“Every day?” 

“Yeah,” she says. She glances at him, sidelong. “I keep trying.”

“I miss you,” he says. It just comes out. “You walked away from Arkadia, and I get that, but every day I turn around and I think—”

“If you would just walk over the next hill,” Clarke finishes for him. “If I could just see your face,” she says, with all the loneliness he feels, “hear you call my name,” and her eyes are locked on his, and he can see it, the message in them that he couldn’t read before, plain as anything, and there is nothing in the world stopping him from what he does next, which is to pull her in and kiss her, tangle his hands in her hair and press their mouths together desperately, with all the hunger and tenderness he’s been shoving down, burying in himself, since the second he watched her turn away. Clarke fists her hands in his coat and drags him closer, takes and takes and takes from him, and he gives her everything, all of him, pours himself completely, body and soul, into a kiss that should never, ever end.

But it does.

“God _damn_ it!” he shouts, into the empty woods. Clutching his empty hands in the air, becoming fists.

The next time he sees her he tries to pull her close again, tries to show her everything he’s feeling, but she puts her hands against his chest and says,

“No, we can’t,” in a tight, low, trembling voice. “We shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t—what sense does it make,” she says. “We’re years apart, it’s—it’s crazy, you’re—I’m right there, really, and you’re here, too, what happens when time catches up, what do we—”

“I don’t care,” Bellamy says. “Clarke, I couldn’t give less of a shit.”

“I have to care,” she says. “We’ll have to live with it, whatever we do. You’re—you’re yesterday, for me. You’re not here.”

“I love you,” he says, and she stops, and her mouth actually parts, and her eyes go wild again, wild like that first day, when she thought she was only dreaming. Can this really be the first time he's ever said it? It is for him, obviously, but for her? Is he really that stupid, future him? He doesn't know what anything means. His heart feels like a drum. “Isn’t that enough? Can that be enough for you, for once?”

“Bellamy,” she says. “You’re—you’re always enough for me, you’re—” she says, and drags him down, and then they’re kissing again, alone in the half-dark of his bunk. Everyone else is drinking shitty moonshine at some impromptu harvest festival, because a couple of tomato plants came up and they’re desperate for anything good, and he is alone in the cool depths of the old ring with Clarke’s warm arms around his neck, her thighs over his. They tumble to the floor and she pulls her jacket off, finally, and her arms are bare and smooth, except where they’re marked by little scars, knicks from thorns and older cuts, signs of her survival; he kisses them and Clarke shuts her eyes in pleasure or pain, he can’t tell. He drags his shirt off over his head and she kisses down his throat and then she’s unbuttoning her pants, kicking her boots off, and he’s swallowing hard and asking if she’s sure, if she really wants— “Yes,” she says. “Yes,” she keeps saying, while he pulls his own shorts down and she rolls under him and strokes him and then spreads her legs apart, curls her own fingers inside and brings them back out wet, and keeps kissing him while he slides into her and stops breathing and just presses his face into her throat, overcome, shattered already. His arms shake and her knees come up around his hips, hold onto him. Her hand splays on his back, her other hand cups his face, his jaw, threads her fingers into his hair. “I love your hair,” she says, and he kisses her deep and slow and starts to move, and then they are fucking, really fucking, as fast and hard as they can go without losing the kiss, the clinging need to keep their faces pressed together, forehead to forehead, breathing in whatever the other exhales. They are fucking against time, against loss: she could be gone again at any second, a million hours apart. He can’t bear it, being without her. 

“I love you, so much,” he pants. “I miss you so much.” She’s perfect and too much and everywhere around him, shutting the world out. He’s died and gone to heaven, and heaven is her. 

“I miss you, too,” she says, with him inside her. He knows what she means, he knows she knows too. The feeling, all of this: it’s mutual. “I love you,” she says, then, and he almost loses it right at that, almost goes off from the sound of it, the feeling of her breathing those words onto his cheek; he goes deeper and angles himself and takes a breath and lets Clarke arch her hips up, work herself on him the way she needs to, until she is sighing and screwing up her eyes and making high-pitched little noises that go higher and higher. He reaches down between them to touch her, finds the rhythm that makes her break and lose it and come. He kisses her throat while she cries out, feels the pulse and the shout at once through the skin of her neck, against his mouth. She goes boneless and wraps her arms around him, nuzzles his bare shoulder and nips at him, and it takes him roughly forty more seconds before it’s over, he can’t hold on any more: he comes harder than he’s ever come in his life, almost like he’s blacking out, his hips jerking helpless little circles against hers over and over, even after it’s done.

They get dressed again, after, just in case she disappears. They linger over it, sliding each other’s shirts over their heads, pressing kisses on the bare skin before it’s covered again. She leaves her jacket off and they sit against the wall, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. They don’t talk about the future but about the past, the past they share: the camp, the first days. The strange freedom of it. The never-ending fear. 

“Things change,” he says. He smiles, thinking of this morning. “If you told me a year ago, LIncoln would be joining up with the guards—”

“That’s happening now?” she says, sitting up. Her voice is suddenly tight. 

“Yeah, why?”

“Don’t trust Pike,” she tells him. She slides out from under his arm and twists around to look at him, barely restrained panic in her features. “He’ll walk our people right into a nightmare.” It doesn’t truly surprise him, that Clarke would take that view of PIke. He’s wary of the guy, but has to admit he makes some useful points in strategy meetings. If Clarke were still in Arkadia, though, there’d have been an explosion by now, the whole council would probably be in meltdown mode. They nearly are already. “He’ll talk about keeping them safe,” Clarke adds. “Preventative strike. But it would be a massacre. You can’t let it happen.”

“Wait,” Bellamy says. A thought strikes him. It’s so horrible he almost doesn’t voice it. But he has to. “Did I?” Clarke’s eyes shift, anxiously. His stomach plummets. “Did I let it happen?”

“You didn’t know how far he’d take it,” she starts, and his whole body flushes cold, then hot. 

“Fuck. Are you serious?”

“You didn’t want—”

“A massacre?” He jolts upright, away from her. “ _Another_ massacre,” he says, and Clarke flinches. “What, are you telling me—you’re telling me I’m—part of, again?” He covers his face with both hands. He can’t feel anything. “How. When,” he says, dully. 

“Soon,” she says, softly. “A big grounder encampment. At night, by surprise. They didn’t have a chance.”

“No. No, no.” He slides down against the wall, to the floor, helplessly. He still can’t look at her. “How many people?”

“I don’t need to tell you, because you’re not going to let it happen.”

“How many?”

“I’m not—”

“ _Clarke_!” he shouts, and lifts his head. “Please.”

“Three hundred,” she says. “Give or take.” He opens his mouth to make a sound, but it doesn’t come out.

“Then why,” he says, finally. “Why would you do this?”

“Do what?” Bellamy gestures wearily around at the floor, the pile of blankets they just emerged from, still warm. At himself. “Bellamy,” Clarke says. Reeling. “Don’t.”

“You knew,” he says. “You know all of it, you know everything, and you dole out to me in these—scraps. And now I find out I’m some kind of… mass killer, again, on top of all of it, and you still act like I’m—”

“I’m a killer, too,” Clarke says, brutally. Her eyes are wet, but she’s not crying. There’s steel back in her voice. “Don’t forget.”

“What was it you said to me?” Bellamy asks. “I never forget. I never forget, Clarke, I just thought—I thought maybe it was over, that we would just—that we’d just live, now, and maybe if we kept living things would get better, but now I see. It just keeps going, and going,” he says, and Clarke’s face is crumpling, and he still can’t shut up, he wishes he could, more than anything. “The killing doesn’t stop, nothing stops. That’s why you don’t want to tell me things,” he says. He finally understands. He understands everything, all at once. It’s crushing. It’s unbearable. He can hardly breathe. “You don’t want to tell me about the future because it’s just misery that never ends.”

“No,” she says. “No, I promise it’s not.”

“Is that why you call into that fucking radio every day? Because everybody else is gone? Because they’re all dead?”

Her face hardens.

“I do that because I have _hope_!” 

“I’m dead, aren’t I?’ he says, flatly. “I died, and you just won’t say it.”

“ _I_ died!” Clarke bursts out. “ _I’m_ the one who died!” Bellamy freezes.

“What?”

“I died,” she says. She’s going colder; slipping into that deadly calm of hers, before she cuts a rope, seals a door. Makes the call. “I’m the one who got left here. I should have died, but I didn’t. I just wished I had, over and over and over. Every day until the day that I saw you. I saw you in the woods, the way you used to be, and I thought—maybe, maybe there was still something worth living for. Something worth fighting for. Fighting to get back to. I saw you and I told myself, _get up_. Get up, Clarke! And I got up again. I kept walking. I stayed alive—”

“Clarke,” he starts to say, ashamed, “I’m sorry,” but it’s too late. She was gone mid-sentence, in the middle of a breath. Her taste is still in his mouth. Her jacket is still draped across the foot of his bunk. He sits in the dark and stares at it, at nothing, until it’s almost dawn.

Days pass. He works with Kane to beat PIke in the council election. Pike takes a bunch of people and twice as many guns and marches out of Arkadia and into the wild, and it takes days of negotiations to work things out with Lexa’s people. They walk on eggshells, waiting to hear news of war. In the meantime he waits, he looks. He watches everywhere for a sign of her, a trace. He keeps the jacket, puts medipacks and dried fruit in the pockets and carries it everywhere he goes, in the back of his bag or the back of the rover. Waiting.

She doesn’t come back.

His own Clarke, if that’s what she is, does. She’s sadder, tougher. If such a thing were possible. When he first sees her again he hugs her a little too tightly. If she’s surprised, she’s kind enough not to show it. She hugs him back tightly, too. 

“Missed you,” she says.

“Ditto,” he says, into her hair.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It’s been getting longer and longer between each visit, he realizes that now: he took a datapad from the ops station and marked all the days out in a big calendar of the past year. It used to be days or weeks he had to wait, and now it’s months that pass by before she comes back. Whatever force has been bringing her here is just… petering out. Drying up. Winding down. 

Someday—someday soon—she might not come back at all.

It’s hard for him to understand how he’s supposed to feel about that. He misses her—misses so many things about her, the way she looks at him, the feel of her in his arms, her grim little laugh, even that hideous jacket—but she’s not gone, not really. She’s right there. The her that belongs to now. She spends half her time in Polis with Lexa these days, but she’s fighting as hard as ever to protect them, to keep her people safe. When she’s in Arkadia they make a point to hang out together, to grab meals together in the makeshift cafeteria, to camp out after dark by the fire and drink from Sinclair’s questionable stash and talk until they can’t sit up anymore, until their eyes are sliding shut from exhaustion. She really is his best friend. It happened so slowly that he didn’t notice, and then it was too obvious to ignore. 

He walks her back to her bunk. At some point they started talking about Jaha, and how fucking weird he’s been since he came back, and what exactly they’re going to have to do about it, but they’re both tired and buzzed and the conversation keeps looping back around in unproductive ways, so Bellamy peels himself off the wall and says goodnight. Clarke says goodnight too but then she calls him back, quietly, just his name.

“Yeah?” he says. Her face is pensive. He straightens up. “What is it?”

“Lexa asked me to stay,” she says. “In Polis, permanently.” She chews her lip. “I’m thinking about it.”

“Oh,” he says. “That’s—so you two are, uh. Doing good?”

Clarke’s face doesn’t pink, but she does glance away for a second, tug at her hair.

“Yeah,” she says. “And if it was just—us, I think we’d—I think it’d be easier to say yes. But I don’t know if I’ll ever really belong in Polis.”

“No offense, Polis kind of sucks,” Bellamy says, and Clarke huffs a laugh. “But Lexa… you guys have something together.”

“We do,” Clarke admits. “I never thought I’d forgive her, for the mountain. But I did. She’s so—”

“She’s a born leader,” Bellamy says. He nods. “I know the type. Commanders. Royalty. Real bossy,” he says, and Clarke smacks his arm. “I’m kidding. I mean hard to resist.” 

“Uh huh.”

“Whatever you choose, we’re here, okay?” he says. “We’re your people." He clears his throat. "I'm your people. Always.”

She pulls him in for a hug and they linger there for a long second, holding each other, before she goes to bed and he walks away. He used to be afraid that it would hurt, this moment. Seeing her really happy with somebody else. Even if he didn’t know, back then, exactly what it was he wanted from her. To win an argument? To fall into bed? To strangle each other, to fall head-over-heels? All of those at once? HIs feelings used to be all over the place. Now they’re mostly in one place, which is: he loves her. He loves her, both of her. All of her. Whoever she is, whenever she is, whatever she wants. Whoever she wants. It doesn’t matter. He’ll always be here when she needs him. That's what he wants, most of all.

He’s made a decision, since they slept together and he pretty much ruined everything between them. He’s never going to let that future happen. The one where she has to be alone, spilling her heartbreak into a busted radio for years and years, raising a kid with nobody to help her, nobody to take the weight off her shoulders even for a minute, to tell her _I got this_ and then handle it. Nobody to anchor her, the way she’s always anchored him. Never gonna happen, Bellamy thinks. Over his dead fucking body. 

He is thinking about that when he turns down the hallway towards his own quarters and sees her standing there, her short hair tied tightly back from her face, wearing a grey henley with holes in it, and carrying a bag over one shoulder. There are deep circles under her eyes, like she hasn't been sleeping. He steps up close to her and tries to sober up with sheer willpower on the way. It doesn’t really work. “Hey,” he says, urgently, “Clarke, I’m sorry, I never—”

She holds out her hand. Holds them apart. Slings the bag off her shoulder and offers it to him. 

"You deserve this," she says. "Take it."

"Clarke," he says, low, pleading, "I—"

"Take it," she says. She's not angry, he doesn't think. Just so, so tired. "Please." He takes the bag, opens it. There's a ragged notebook inside, leatherbound, tied up with a dirty ribbon. "It's everything I remember. I tried to write in order, as much as I could."

"Holy shit," he says. He stares at her. "This is—you're not afraid it'll change things? Knowing all this?"

"You told me Pike left," she says. 

"What?"

"Pike. You guys voted him down and he left, right?"

"Yeah," he says, scratching at his scalp. "Why?"

"I still remember it," she says. "I remember the way it was. The… massacre. Everything that happened after. I remember all of that. You changed things. But for me, nothing changed at all. It's the same with everything that happens. For me… none of it's different."

"So," he says. He trails off. "Maybe just…maybe we change things, but somehow you still… you're the only one who's traveling back and forth. So maybe you're the only one who remembers the way things used to be?"

"Maybe," Clarke says. "Or maybe I was wrong the whole time."

"Wrong about what?"

"About being from your future," she says. "Being from your world."

The floor sways under him. He has to reach out a hand to steady himself.

"What," he breathes.

"I'm not her," Clarke says. "I don't think I am. As much as I… and you're," she starts, and can't finish. She just looks at him. Her eyes are shining, her mouth is a thin line. Bellamy feels seasick.

"I'm not him," he says, when the silence is too much.

Clarke shakes her head. 

"I don't—I don't regret anything," she says, and reaches up to touch him; at the last second she stops herself, just smoothes down the front of his shirt with her fingertips. "Being with you, it's—you are him, really. A version of him. There's no version of you that I don't—love," she says, brokenly, and wipes under her eyes. "You have to know that."

"Clarke," he says. "I know." He cups the side of her face, draws her in. Presses a kiss to the top of her head. She inhales against him. Like she's taking him in. Memorizing it.

"I should, uh," she says, after a beat, stepping back. "I think it's getting harder for me to come here. So I thought I should bring you the book now, in case—I think it's the radiation," she adds. "I think it's finally starting to dissipate completely. That might have been it from the beginning, actually, a big enough wave of radiation to jump me back—"

"Radiation?"

"Read the book," she says, and he laughs. She smiles back at him but it's aching, strained. He did it, after all. Broke her heart.

"I," he says. "Clarke, I—"

"You don't have to say it," she says. "I'm not actually—"

"Will you let me finish?" he grumbles, and now she laughs, a real one. "I love you," he says, and takes her hand. Holds it. She watches his face with her beautiful eyes; he could drown in them, cheerfully. Forever. But he knows now they'll never have the time. He broke her heart and she is right behind him, breaking his: together in everything, after all. "I love you. And so does he. Trust me. I know it."

"How?" she whispers.

"There's no world where I don't," he promises. "It doesn't exist."

She smiles again and starts to say, may we meet—

And then it's over.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  


He reads the whole thing. It takes him a day and a half because he has to keep putting it down and walking away from it. It's almost too much to take, the things they lived through. The things she's living with. 

When he's finished he takes a long walk around the compound, then out past the fence. Miller's on the gate, he doesn't even have think of an excuse for why he's wandering off in the middle of the day. He walks and walks and walks and just looks at things: at the trees and the flowers, the dirt he's leaving footprints in, the odd butterfly and cricket and the strong sunlight filtering down from the canopy. The earth. The world. They keep dying over it, scrapping for it inch by inch. But he can't remember the last time he just looked at it, took it in. Wondered at it. Drew in a breath and felt it inside him, around him.

He gets back before sunset, when the dinner bell's ringing. Clarke is walking in with Octavia and Lincoln, the three of them deep in conversation; they see him walking up and slow down to meet him. Lincoln gives him a nod, Octavia gives him a playful shove. Clarke shades her eyes to look up at him.

"Can I talk to you for a second?" he says. "It's important."

"Sure," she says. 

"Well, I'm starving," Octavia says. "See if I leave any for you guys." She walks off, grinning over her shoulder. Lincoln shrugs and smiles and follows.

In his room Bellamy unwraps the notebook but doesn't hand it over right away. Clarke's sharp eyes scan it, then flicker up to meet his.

"I don't really know how to explain this," he says. "I know it's going to sound crazy. But I need you to trust me. Because I can't—I need you." He takes in a hard breath. "I can't do this alone."

Clarke studies him.

"You never have to," she says, and holds her hand out. "Show me."

So he does.

  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

  
  
Everything changes. 

Well. 

Except for the things that can't.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They are maybe two weeks out from praimfraya when the advance storms hit, sending everything into panic mode: there's no more time to plan, to gather, to build. All they can do is get people into shelter as fast as possible. Seventeen hundred in the bunker under Polis. Close to a thousand in Arkadia, safely sealed into the old quarters of the station, which for them was never sabotaged. Both of the shelters are outfitted with Raven and Monty's overcautious redundancies for water reclaimers, oxygen scrubbers, algae grow tanks. And as a last resort, in case every planet-bound option fails, forty people are going up to the Ark in a refitted rocket. A failsafe to rebuild humanity, if it comes to that. When Raven read that part of the notebook, the last pages, she went off into the lab for hours, emerging with a bunch of scribbled drawings and a frenzied look on her face.

"It could work," Raven had said, shaking her head. "It's just insane enough for us." 

They did the math carefully, over and over. Forty was the absolute maximum, before the rocket would start to shear apart at launch from the weight. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine would be safer, but Raven pushes hard to get them literally every body she can. When they get up there, they'll have years to figure out their return. There are shuttles, pods, plenty of booster rockets to peel off the old rings. If they can get up, they can get back. 

Clarke is going with them.

It wasn't her idea at first; it was one of those things that Abby got fixated on, as soon as the plan was presented. Sending Clarke up, far away from the radiation wave. Just in case. Abby's been having nightmares for months, apparently: endless dreams of Clarke lying on the ground, covered in radiation burns, collapsing as the sky bleeds red. Sometimes, privately, Bellamy wonders if they're not dreams but visions, a kind of message from the other Clarke, another way of reaching through. Abby wants her daughter as far from the ground as possible. Clarke might have fought her, if things had been different. If Lexa hadn't died, freeing everyone from the City of Light. If Clarke hadn't blamed herself. If the grounders hadn't blamed her too, pushed her away. Dubbed her a killer, again. Octavia and Lincoln and Indra and Luna, as heads of the new coalition, did a lot of damage control on that one, but in the end it was simply better not to put Clarke in the bunker. And although she won't admit to it, Bellamy knows that as much as she loves her mother, she didn't really want to be in Arkadia with Abby and Kane, who still have a pathological thing about putting people under twenty-five on the council. Like they're not all ancient in lived time, now. Like they're not all so much older than they should be. 

Bellamy's not leaving the ground as long as his sister is still underneath it, so that was that. He'll stay in Arkadia, as the representative of the remaining hundred. She'll go up, away. She'll never be the one who stays behind; even Madi was found, after a long search, and taken in by Luna for protection. Hellion that she seemed at first, she was a beloved bunker crew mascot in about a week, riding around on Lincoln's shoulders. She'll grow up underground; apart from this Clarke, who never really knew her, but with her people. Their people. Family.

"Once the wave passes, and we get the satellite working again, we'll have radio," Clarke says. "We won't be totally disconnected. All three shelters should be able to talk to each other."

"I'll call you every day," he says, and she laughs, because she doesn't know he means it. That detail wasn't in the notebook and he hasn't said anything about it. It feels like it wasn't his to share.

It's down to final checks one morning when he gets a staticky summons over the patched-up new intercoms; he finds Kane in the command center, looking worried, while Abby paces a slow agitated circle back and forth with a hand to her brow.

"It's Raven," Kane says. "She says they're having trouble getting the Ark to respond. Everything was on target this morning and they were supposed to launch by now, but if they still can't turn the power on—"

"Then they're dead in the water," Bellamy says, grimly. "What do they need?"

"There's a signal tower not far from the lab that needs to be re-set, probably got hit by yesterday's storm," Kane says, and a chill goes up Bellamy's neck, raising the hair on his arms. This wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to account for everything, make the plan foolproof. He knows what happens if Clarke goes out to that tower. He prays she hasn't been crazy enough to— "They already sent someone out to do it," Kane goes on, oblivious to Bellamy's frozen stare, "but she hasn't come back. Their rover won't charge up and—"

"It's Clarke!" Abby bursts out. Bellamy feels cold all over, weightless. Of course, of course it is. It's happening all again. No matter what they do. How hard they work to get in front of it. Maybe the future is just a trap, waiting under cover to sink itself into you someday, claw you up. "She went on her own," Abby says. "She's not answering her radio." She looks at Kane. "I told you. I told you what I saw—"

"Abby, please."

"I'll go," Bellamy says. "Tell Raven I'm on my way. I'll take a truck, get Clarke, get the tower reset, and be back as soon as I can."

"There's not much time," Kane says. "The scans have the wave hitting tonight. And it's been surging all over the map, so there's no telling."

"You have to bring her back," Abby says. "You have to find her."

"You should take a team with you, in case—"

"In case of what?" Bellamy snaps, already walking away. "The end of the world?"

He suits up and drives the truck right over the last of the perimeter fence, blasting across the fields as fast as he can without sending himself into a ditch. He careens down the dirt road, which is barely more than a set of grooves made by the supply trucks as they went back and forth between Arkadia and the launch site over the last few days. He drives like a maniac, chanting under his breath at the truck, at himself: come on. Come on. Somewhere around the halfway mark somebody's put a makeshift barrier up, felled branches roped together and turned into a net of spikes; when he sees it and starts to slow down a handful of grounders pop out of the woods, faces covered and weapons drawn. People who didn't make it into the bunker: the left-behind. It's the toughest fucking luck and nobody could deserve it, but right now he's sorry, he can't slow down and they're in his way. Bellamy grits his teeth and drives off the road, jolting along over the rocks and roots while the suspension screams at him and the grounders pelt the escaping body of the truck with spears, arrows. He hits one of them and keeps going, trying not to hear the sound of the body under the wheels.

When he finally spots the tower he takes the uneven hill at speed and slams the brakes at the top, coming to a stop just at the base. He gets out and looks up and down the scaffolding, glancing at the satellite dish at the top, sitting at a crooked angle, broken branches stuck here and there in the machinery. Most likely that's the problem. "Clarke!" he calls, turning to scan the small circle of the hill. "Clarke!"

"I'm here!" he hears, and turns to see her limping up on the other side. She's got a branch under her arm and she's half-hopping, half-dragging herself along. Her foot's bent out at a strange angle. "Bellamy?" she yells. She's only shocked for a second, and then she's rallied again, back to business. "We have to turn that dish!"

"What the hell happened to you?"

"I fell off the tower," she says, and now that they're close enough he can see the tears in her suit, the crushed visor. She doesn't look burned, but who knows what it's doing to her inside. He doesn't know how she's still standing, let alone trying to prop herself up on the scaffold to give the climb another shot. He takes her arm. "Come on, we can do it," she protests.

"I'll do it," he says. "You get in the truck."

"No, I can—"

"Please, Clarke!" he almost shouts. "You know what happens—please get in the goddamned truck."

"Not without you," she says, her eyes burning, and in the end he doesn't fight her. He climbs and she monitors the signal from below; at the last second he's got to kick it into place, clinging to the edge of the platform to get enough force in each blow. Finally it clicks over and hums to life, and from below Clarke yells in excitement. "That's it!" she calls. "Perfect alignment! Let's go!"

He turns to head down, and then—

—he sees it.

The great red wave, drowning out the horizon. Roaring, rolling. Faster than anyone could have imagined. The tide that'll swallow them all. Not tonight. Now.

He looks down at Clarke, back up at the raging rim of the fire; he's up high enough that the refracted churning mass of it distorts even the curve of the earth. He can see partway down the road, towards Arkadia. If he leaves now, right this second, slides down the scaffolding and gets into the truck, he'll make it back. Maybe with only minutes to spare. Seconds. But he'll make it. He looks in the other direction, towards the launch site sitting adjacent to the lab. It's not so far. Barely a fifteen-minute walk. For somebody with two working feet.

He takes one more look back, at the way he came, and makes his choice. He doesn't really have to think about it.

By the time Bellamy slides down she's already started for the lab, hobbling on her tree-branch crutch desperately, dragging what's probably a broken ankle behind her in the dirt. He starts the truck and rolls after her, blocks her way. "Bellamy, go!" she yells, waving him on. "Go back, there's no time!" He gets out and walks around to open the back gate, then walks up and lifts under her arms, hauling her along with him. She hits his shoulder and curses but he sets her down into the truck and rolls her away from the gate as he closes it behind her. "Bellamy!" she screams, pounding on it. "You can't waste time! I can get there! You need to go back!"

"I will," he yells, "I will, just let me do this!"

He drives fast down the hill, screeches up to the loading dock and half-carries Clarke inside, through the double-sealed airlock into the lab bunker. They're sprayed by the decontamination shower, vibrating with impatience, but they don't bother taking their suits off inside; he just loops an arm around her waist and hops her to the passageway that links the lab and the rocket, where he hopes somebody's still waiting. 

"Clarke, thank goodness!" Harper says, emerging from the mouth of the passage. "Monty! Monty, she's back!" She looks down at Clarke's twisted boot, at Bellamy, and rushes to take Clarke's weight out of his arms. *We need help!" she shouts back to the tunnel, and after a second Monty comes running with Raven, both of them radiating relief… until they see him. After a pause Monty goes to help Harper, looking back at him every few seconds as they help Clarke limp along. 

"It's okay," Clarke says over and over, like a mantra, as she moves stiffly and clumsily along. "It's okay, it'll be okay." She glances over her shoulder at Raven. "One more. We'll make it work. We have to make it work," she says, intently, demanding. "Right? We can make it work?" Raven opens her mouth but Bellamy cuts in before she can answer.

"We'll make it work," Bellamy says. "I'm right behind you." Clarke looks like she's about to argue, but her next step is a painful one and she hisses instead and relents, finally letting Monty move her forward. 

"Hey," Raven says, quietly, as they follow more slowly, putting space between them and Clarke. "There's not really—"

"I know," he says. Raven stares at him. 

"But you'll... make it back?"

"There was time to drive one way or the other," Bellamy says, low, meeting her eyes. "The wave's already there by now."

"Bellamy!"

"Go," he says. "It's okay."

"No," Raven says. "Fuck. No. It's not fucking okay." She shakes her head, angrily. "We could, maybe… another weight test. Dump something—"

"Your fuel? Your shielding?" Bellamy says, under his breath. Raven doesn't say anything. Just looks stricken. She turns away, away from Clarke and the others. He knows it's so that they won't see her face. Up ahead, they're helping Clarke over the ladder. She looks back, before she's in, and finds him. Gives him a shaky smile. He returns it. And then looks at Raven, who's biting her nails while running numbers in her head, obviously. "Stop," he says. "Your calculations are perfect. You know that. Forty people. Anything more and you risk it all. You can't wait any more. Go."

"I won't," Raven says. "I won't do this, Bellamy."

"You have to," he says. "You have to keep them safe." He pulls her into a hug and she hugs back, fiercely. 

"The lab's completely shielded," Raven whispers. "We filled up the water stores, just in case, before—if you hole up there's a chance you could ride it out, at least long enough to get back to Arkadia—or—I could stay. Let me. I'm the one who knows how to run this place—"

"No," he says. "They need you. They're gonna need you every step of the way. And you know it." He gives her one more squeeze, and lets her go. "You have to go, Raven." She steps back, damp-eyed. "Hey. It's not goodbye," he says. "I'll see you again."

"You better," Raven says. She swipes at her face. "Take care of yourself. Please."

"You too," he says. "Go." He turns away. And back, one more time. "Raven?" 

"Yeah?"

"Would you tell her," he says, and stops. He has no idea what to say. There's just too much. He can't think of anything except for everything, everything he never got a chance to say, to do, to be for her. He stands there in silence, his empty hands clenching. Nothing comes out. But somehow, Raven understands. 

"I'll tell her," she says. And then, with feeling: "May we meet again." 

"May we meet again," he echoes. She goes up the ladder and he starts his slow walk back up through the passageway to close the inner chambers up, to seal himself inside. He can feel the distant rumble of the engines warming up, a tremor all around. Behind him, before the last door closes, he can almost hear Clarke starting to scream.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He lives.

There are moments when he wishes he hadn't.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He lasts thirteen months in the lab before the air purifiers start to go down, one by one, choking on the sludge outside. He tries to repair them from the conduits at this end, reading the schematics step by step, but he's only partly successful. The water recyclers are still working, because he knows how to change the filters, but there are only a handful of filters left, and after that, well. It's drinking your own piss time. He's pretty sure you get diminishing returns from that experience. The radios still don't work: too much signal interference, or problems with the satellite, or something else. He doesn't know. He's trapped here, waiting, listening to the static. He still tries every day.

Finally, far beyond stir-crazy—scruffy beard, check, smelly body from rationing his scrub-downs, check, continual nap hangover from depression sleeping, check, talking to himself out loud all the time, super double check—and mummified in two radiation suits, he takes a walk. The sunlight hurts his eyes, at first. For a minute after he adjusts and takes in the blankness he's afraid he's gone partially blind, but pretty soon he realizes: the world is gone. Just… gone. He doesn't have a better word for it than that.

There are no landmarks anymore, not really. He tries his compass but it's all over the place. He's not sure if a giant radiation wave can affect things like the poles, but who the hell knows. For that first walk he just makes a long slow circle around the lab, marking things as he goes, trying to re-learn the topography without losing sight of the bunker doors. After a while he starts to feel sick and retreats back inside, swallows a dose of the radiation pills they had in the emergency stash. He stays inside for the rest of the week and waits to die, if he's going to. He doesn't.

He takes another walk, makes a wider circle, marking his trail the whole way. He has a basic idea of where Arkadia is, but no real sense of how long it will take on foot, over the changed terrain. And no idea what he'll find when he gets there. He tries to scout a spot to build a future camp, for when he's ready to make the journey, but there's just so much… nothing. There's barely anything alive anywhere, except for a few scrubby bushes that look like they were already a thousand years old when the wave hit. They're fragile and drying out now. They won't last much longer without water. 

"Yeah, me too, brother," he says aloud, patting a bush. He's a million light years past being embarrassed about his external monologue. 

His third walk takes him far out of sight of the bunker: at some point he crosses over another hill and looks back and suddenly he can't see it anymore, not even as a tiny distant blip. He panics. He starts sprinting back in the direction he thinks is the right one, clutching his bag under one arm, the valves of the suit rattling and his whole body sweating but feeling freezing cold, flushed with fear. He gets lost. And then he's just wandering in circles panting like a terrified animal, yelling his frustration into the emptiness of everything, more alone than he's ever been in his entire life. "Come on!" he screams. "Come on!" He doesn't know if he's yelling at the bunker, at Arkadia, at some kind of vanished gods. At himself. At all of them.

There comes a moment when he can't walk anymore. It's only half exhaustion: it's not his legs that have given out. It's his spirit. He sinks down into the greyish dirt and lowers his bag to the ground, breathing heavily. His stomach is in knots, his whole body is trembling. He can't think. He has to use his head, keep calm. He knows he has to keep moving, keep looking. He's probably almost there. But he can't make himself rise. He sits there staring into the ruined ground and thinking empty thoughts, his mind a giant blank of terror and crushing loneliness: the nothingness looms over him on all sides, caving him in. 

Over the sound of his pounding heart, he hears a twig snap.

Bellamy looks up and—

—sees trees, sunlight. 

It's somewhere he knows. A memory.

He is kneeling on the forest floor, lush and green and whispering with a breeze; even through the suit he can feel how cool the air is, how softly it moves. He blinks. Rubs a gloved hand across the visor, smearing the sand across it until it blurs. He's died, he thinks. He feels far from his body. He's died and this is—

"Don't move," someone says. He turns his head back. His throat closes. It's not possible. But she's here. Right in front of him. He sits perfectly still and just watches her. She's wearing her old windbreaker, the one she wore to pieces, patched up with tent fabric. It looks almost new. Her hair is long and loose. The gun she has trained on him is probably his own. "Who are you?" Clarke says. 

He realizes the visor must be a little too dirty for her to see him properly. He raises his hands and she raises the gun.

"I'm just gonna clean my visor," he says, calmly. It feels like a dream. He's floating. "Okay? I'll go slow. Then you can see my face."

Clarke's face pinches up, uncertain, at his voice.

"Do I... know you?" she says. "Are you from the Ark?"

"Kind of," he says. He swipes away the grime on the visor screen with his fingers and palm. It mostly works. He can see her more clearly now: her beautiful curious eyes, her strong jaw, clenched. If he really is hallucinating, it's a good one. It's fine. He lowers his hands and she relaxes a fraction. "Okay," he says. "This might sound crazy—"

"Bellamy?" she says. He has to shut his eyes for a second at that, like in the depths of the mountain, at the sound of his name from her mouth. Her voice is a little strangled. Like she can't believe what she's saying, either. "What—how?"

"Clarke," he says. "You have no idea how good it is to see you."

"Why are you wearing—why do you look like that?" she says, bewildered. "Did you… when did you grow a beard?"

"Uh, last year sometime?" he says, and feels so very stupid, and suddenly the deja vu of it, the absurdity, strikes him hard. It winds him like a sucker punch. He can't believe this. Is this all a loop, a wheel? A puppet show? He's been here before in this moment, in reverse: it's all happening again. Just in a mirror. Did it mean anything? All their work and all their grief and it's just going to… what, start again? All over again? He laughs raggedly. "Now I know. Now I know how you felt," he says. "How she felt. Whoever. Holy shit," he says. "Holy shit, Clarke, you just wouldn't believe—"

"What happened to you?" she asks. He stops rambling. Looks at her. How young she is. How strong, already, against her fear. It sobers him up. The panic starts to clear.

She's here in front of him, he thinks. They're both alive. That's a miracle. Another chance.

"You happened to me," he says. Clarke frowns.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's a good thing," he says. "I promise."

"Okay," she says, skeptically, slowly. "You're sure you're Bellamy?" He can feel a laugh bubbling up inside him, a real one. His face cracks into a smile. He doesn't know the last time that happened. Can't remember.

"Pretty sure," he says. "Clarke, I—"

But then she's gone. The forest with her. He stares out at the place where she was just standing, his eyes unfocusing, starting to tear up. He blinks hard, trying not to lose it. He can't be alone again, he can't do it. He is still shaking on his knees when he sees it: a distant shimmering. A thin line of light, far enough away that it's mirage-like, flickering across the waste. He cranes his neck and squints and realizes what he's looking at: it's one of the old massive satellite arms of the ring, sticking out from the earth at a crooked, scarecrow angle. Most of it is probably covered in the same fine grit that covers everything, that covers him, but at least one bit is still shiny, still bare. Reflecting sunlight. It might be a mile away, maybe less. He follows the line of the satellite arms downward, to what he mistook before for the rise of far hills. They're not hills at all, though they are buried in heaps of dirt, of ash, of broken desiccated trees. She was standing right there, like the needle of his broken compass. His north. Pointing his way home.

He is looking _right_ at Arkadia.

Bellamy bends in half and laughs until he's sobbing, until he's lightheaded. His gloved fingers dig into the ground, his back bows and shakes. "Thank you," he says, out loud, like a prayer. "Thank you." He knows she can't hear him, but someday she will. When they're together again. Someday he'll tell her everything.

He lies there with his visor in the dirt for a long time, just breathing.

He knows now: he'll survive. One step in front of the other. One morning, one day, one night at a time. They will meet again. He'll get his sister back, hold her in his arms. All their friends. They'll start over. He'll be ready, waiting. He'll do whatever he needs to. He'll keep fighting, keep helping, keep trying. Keep going. That's what they do: whether they are together, whether they are thousands of miles, thousands of hours apart. He knows that, he's sure now. He has hope. 

_Get up_ , Bellamy thinks at himself, like she must have, in a desert just like this one. She is so far away right now that he can barely see the Ark glitter at night, amidst the stars. But he has never felt closer. So close he can almost feel her hand in his, pulling him upright with all her strength. He knows now that they will never really be alone. That they never have been. They will always, always reach out for one another. They will pick each other up, one more time. Over and over. And he will never let go.

_Get up_ , he thinks.

And stands.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
__"There's no race, there's only a runner;  
_just keep one foot in front of the other..._  
__There's no race, no ending in sight;  
__no second too short, no window too tight.  
__Just turn off the lights when you leave,  
__'cause we've got everything we're gonna need."  
\--Lucius, Two of Us on the Run  
  



End file.
